The Yard Presents Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group

The Yard Theatre presents Reggie Wilson/FIST & HEEL PERFORMANCE GROUP in CITIZEN.

Monday, August 8, 2016 at 7PM at the MV High School Performing Arts Center (PAC) in Oak Bluffs. Tickets: $35 (General); $20 (Seniors/Students/Military); $5 (Children under 12).

*Behind the Counter and membership discounts apply

Opening the 2016 Martha's Vineyard African American Film Festival, Reggie Wilson plummets down into CITIZEN's subconscious levels asking the core questions: "What does it mean to belong?" and "What does it mean to NOT want to belong?" This multidisciplinary work wrestles with the many implicit and explicit challenges, struggles, judgments, and webbing that exists between the anonymity of the individual and the experiences of being a citizen of one's homeland or one's adopted homeland. CITIZEN demands us to consider the contradictions imbedded in the co-existence of our individual self with our civil duties.

Specific persons-of-interest in Wilson's research are African Americans in Paris and others in the Diaspora who fought for the human right to "belong." Of recurring interest is Zora Neale Hurston who returned to and remained in America, even though many of her artist contemporaries went elsewhere.

CITIZEN hopes to engage and connect audiences to perspectives and conversations regarding belonging, immigration/migration, and the black and white of America.

Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group is a Brooklyn-based Dance Company that investigates the intersections of cultural anthropology and movement practices and believes in the potential of the body as a valid means for knowing. Our performance work is a continued manifestation of the rhythm languages of the body provoked by the spiritual and the mundane traditions of Africa and its Diaspora, including the Blues, Slave, and Gospel idioms. The group has received support from major foundations and corporations and has performed at notable venues in the United States and abroad.

Reggie Wilson/Fist & Heel Performance Group is the recipient of The Yard's 2016 Offshore Creation Residency, which enables the artists to pursue their explorations of what matters most.

Reggie Wilson (Artistic Director, choreographer, and performer) draws from the cultures of Africans in the Americas and combines them with post-modern elements and his own personal movement style to create what he calls "post-African/Neo-HooDoo Modern dances." He has lectured, taught, conducted workshops, community projects, and has had his work presented nationally and internationally, most recently at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music, New York Live Arts, The Dance Center at Columbia College (Chicago), ICA and Summer Stages (Boston), and Tanzkongress 2013 (Germany). Mr. Wilson is the recipient of the Minnesota Dance Alliance's McKnight National Fellowship (2000-2001), a 2002 BESSIE-New York Dance and Performance Award for his work The Tie-tongued Goat and the Lightning Bug Who Tried to Put Her Foot Down, and is a 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. He has been an artist advisor for the National Dance Project, a Board Member of Dance Theater Workshop, and was named a 2009 United States Artists Prudential Fellow in recognition of his creative contributions to the field. Also in 2009, Mr. Wilson received the Herb Alpert Award in Dance. In 2012, New York Live Arts presented a concert of selecTEd Wilson works, theRevisitation; he was named a Wesleyan University's Creative Campus Fellow; he received a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award; and he received the 2012 Joyce Foundation Award for his new work Moses(es), which had its NY premiere on BAM's Next Wave Festival 2013 and is currently touring. Wilson's newest work, CITIZEN, premieres in fall 2016.

The Yard supports artists in both their creative processes and social instrumentality through paid research residency, public performance, and long- term educational and community engagement across all ages and diverse cultural populations of Martha's Vineyard, and in broad application to New England and the nation. In so doing: The Yard promotes creation, education, and community building through artistic practice-with a special emphasis on contemporary dance and related collaborative forms-in the defining rural/island environment of Martha's Vineyard. The Yard acts, on behalf of its core commitments, as an active collaborator, co-commissioner, and touring partner with other leading institutions across a regional/national/international context to raise up a "culture of cultures" ecology that reflects-and benefits-the demographic life and times of the island of Martha's Vineyard and the country.

Photo credit: AITOR MENDILIBAR